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Kelly Slater at 36
The greatest surfer of all time insists that right now is what’s next. We've decided we believe him
by Brad Melekian

“We all live an illusion of who we are. Probably lots and lots of illusions of who we actually are. And it’s hard to know the truth of who you are.”  

First of all, I have no idea how Kelly Slater sleeps.

If I was forced to hazard an answer, I’d say “well,” because he answered “yes” to two critical questions that I asked him: 1) Have you made enough money that you never have to work again? And 2) Is it true that you’re staying in a house with your girlfriend and her seven female college roommates?

Yes to both, he told me, and that sounds like a nice eight hours and a couple of solid REM cycles to me.

Second of all, and truth be told, I don’t much care how Kelly Slater sleeps. Or where, for that matter.

I’m much more interested in what Kelly Slater thinks, and if what he says he thinks is true.

Like when he perpetually tells people that he doesn’t know if he’ll continue to compete on the World Tour. Or when he tells his competitors that he loves them.

Is it true? Or is it simply what a guy who lives his life under constant scrutiny says to muddy the waters and protect himself in the process?

Those questions I don’t know the answer to. What I do know is that Kelly Slater is charming, charismatic, intelligent, and eminently believable, which makes him refreshingly different from many of the mouth-breathing, entitlement-minded pro surfers for whom he paved the way.

Halfway Home
Jordy Smith joins his old friends on a mission to find Africa's next perfect wave
By Brendon Thomas

The hippos didn't concern me. You could at least see their bulky silhouettes through the pre-dawn gloom. What concerned me more were the crocodiles. “Flatdogs,” the local fishermen call them. Those lethal, scaly masses whose eyes barely breached the surface of the water. Standing shin-deep in the lagoon, we scanned the far bank, silently calculating how long it would take us to get across. “We could paddle out to sea and around the river mouth,” Simon Nicholson offered optimistically.

But that would bring the sharks into play. A rapidly draining lagoon sweeping into notoriously sharky waters made for a bad combination. Normally we would never knowingly put ourselves in this type of situation, one that could mean death or maiming from a number of different directions. But we'd traveled a long way to get to this lagoon where the South African bushveld met the Indian Ocean. We had been lured here by stories of a pointbreak that rivaled the Superbank in form and eclipsed J-Bay in its veracity. The handful of people who had surfed the wave spoke of it in the language of fairytales.

Vagabonding
by Rolf Potts
The Lost Art of Total Immersion Travel

The most remarkable surfer I ever met was a 28-year-old Seattle native named Dusty. I didn’t meet him in Bali, Costa Rica, or even Baja— I met him in a town calledAl Qamishli, in Syria. Look at a map of the Middle East and you’ll see that Al Qamishli sits in the far northeastern corner of the country, not far from the Tigris River, in the border region with both Turkey and Iraq. There are no waves for hundreds of miles.

Dusty (I never did get his last name) caught my attention for two reasons: First, he was the only American I’d seen in two weeks, and second, he was walking through Al Qamishli’s market with a tattered old Pro-Lite board bag, as if this were Bali or Oahu instead of a dusty little Kurdish-Armenian border town full of Turkish and Iraqi smugglers. As it turned out, Dusty hadn’t caught a wave in nearly two months—he’d been sidetracked vagabonding overland through the Middle East, living in the desert, learning some Arabic, and hanging with Bedouins. From Al Qamishli he hoped to cross into Turkey and then Iran, where he’d heard you could surf in the roiling wakes of the giant oil tankers that plied the Persian Gulf. He wasn’t even sure whether or not this was true, but he was on a mission to check it out—and half the thrill for him was getting there.

Flesh and Blood
The Island of the Gods: Six years after
By Matt George

With unblinking eyes, Dimmy and Elizabeth Kotronakis smile and gaze out over the very brand of colonial irresponsibility that got them blown to rags in the first place. It was at this very spot here in Bali that the first terrorist act in history perpetrated directly against Surfers took place at exactly 11:05pm on the 12th of October, 2002. It was here, in the center of Kuta Beach, at two beer soaked nightclubs that catered directly to surfers, resplendent with wall mounted surf videos and signed surfboards from all our heroes, that two massive suicide bombs were detonated within fifteen seconds of each other.

In that last screaming instant, 202 souls surrendered to history.

Of them, 186 were surfers.

And the worst part of it?

We brought it on ourselves.

And upon innocents like the Kotronakis sisters.